


eurydice

by veausy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst, F/M, Freeform, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-02 12:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20276077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: “The last time I saw your face, we were twenty-three.”El hums.“I think I’ve made you immortal.”





	eurydice

The flashing lights growing brighter in his rearview mirror don’t register until the cop turns on his siren. Mike’s bloodshot eyes jerk to the reflection, lips pursing tersely.

“Fuck,” he mutters, pulling over onto the shoulder of the relatively empty freeway and slamming his open palm on the wheel. “_Fuck!_” he snarls, punching the wheel for good measure, as his other hand rises to rub at his forehead, where his migraine has begun to stab at his skull from the inside.

He has approximately fifteen seconds before he’s expected to already have his identification and registration out, and maybe another five seconds before the cop’s at his window. Wiping shaking hands over his face, he reaches toward his glove compartment and hastily extracts all his documentation, rolling the window down and smiling impassively at the officer already looming on the other side.

“Good evening, sir,” the man intones, smiling all friendly like it’ll make this whole process go easier. “Do you know why I’ve pulled you over tonight?”

Mike shrugs.

“Your back lights seem to be out. You’ll want to take care of that as soon as possible to avoid any more dangerous consequences.”

“Right, uh, thanks.”

“Your papers, please.”

The rustle of the pages of his passport is quiet in the still night air, and it’s a small mercy that August has become so mild in the evenings in these parts. Growing up, he remembers running all the way home just to escape the heat and lie starfished on the cold tile kitchen floor. But a lot of things have changed since then, and that’s the least of them.

“Sir, please look into the scanner.”

Mike startles, leaning closer to the door obediently to fit his face into the contraption that the cop is holding out toward him. The edges graze his cheekbones as his eyes squint at the faint red light coming out of the depths of the scanner. Everything starts to grow mushy and slow, and he readies himself for the sensations as they close in on him. His ears feel like they’re stuffed with cotton and his eyes slide nearly shut, but the scanner keeps them ajar just enough to rifle through his brain. The buzzing sensation that’s running over his entire body continues for three seconds, five, and then the device is pulled away. He shuts his eyes, trying to find his focus, and breathes a few times heavily.

“You good, son?”

Mike nods, eyes still squinted shut. The buzzing fades very slowly, still too loud between his ears, and he tries to recollect the last memory that had swum across his mind. Nancy, yelling at him for forgetting to turn the air conditioning down after he housesat for her last week. His chest deflates with a tiny measure of relief, but more of him stays stony and aflame.

When he glances up again through bleary eyes, the cop is watching the little indicator on his side of the scanner for an alert to any suspicious contents. As time ticks by slowly, Mike’s knee starts bobbing beside the steering wheel, just out of sight of the cop. Two cars pass them just under the speed limit, and in the distance a dog howls; an eternity later, the indicator glows green. Mike turns vacant eyes to the cop.

“Very good. All right, here are your papers. Make sure to fix those lights, huh? Don’t want you to run into any accidents in this area, there’s so few streetlights.”

Mike nods curtly, dropping the documents - which are his only guarantee of safety in the world anymore - into the passenger seat and watching the cop’s retreat in the sideview mirror. His heartbeat pounds in his ears, but he waits until the police car zooms out onto the street and disappears into the shadowed trees ahead of them before tipping forward and resting his nose against the wheel. “El,” he croaks, almost inaudibly, as a silent sob wracks his ribcage. He slams his hands a few more times against the dashboard and gasps in wet breaths, finally sitting up to stare through his tears at the dark sky looming at the top of his windshield. “El.”

\--

He drives through the night, sustaining himself on the energy drinks that line the entire bottom layer of his duffel bag and the bags of snacks he’d managed to steal from Dustin's pantry before leaving for the week.

When sunrise blinds him from the horizon, he pulls over and sets his brow bone on the wheel, breathing deeply. The insides of his eyelids burn red as the sun’s rays plow through them, and eventually he lets himself squint at the smooth pewter asphalt before looking at the crimson sky. It’s too vivid, too saturated, just this side of unbelievable. How disorienting to know that there was a time when he’d never seen a single sunrise in his life, and now he greets it every morning.

Yawning widely, he opens the door and climbs out, stretching his legs and his arms above him, head tilted back to let the warm late summer air seep into his pores. It smells faintly of lavender, and he gets himself turned around trying to find a field nearby – but none appears. There’s no trace of it on his clothes, either, he knows because he sniffs every square inch in his search. “Great,” he mutters, kicking his back tire and brushing errant hands through his hair. “Now I’m fucking hallucinating you.”

Nobody responds, and he shakes his head, dismayed by his own reality, staring at his shoes. They’re the shoes she’d bought him during a weekend shopping trip, years ago, before he’d known how much every little thing related to her would mean to him. He leans down to wipe a scuff mark off the toe carefully and then walks around to the trunk, staring at his tail lights inquisitively. The car’s in park and the engine is on, but the lamps are duds. He raps his knuckles against them uselessly and rolls his eyes, folding himself back into the driver’s seat.

As the sun continues to rise in the sky, he sits in silence and rolls over miles of empty road and scans the street signs for a hint of an auto shop.

\--

It costs hundreds of dollars to repair a nonexistent problem with a faulty signal that doesn’t seem to reach the lights, and Mike just accepts it as his due nowadays, sitting in the corner of the lobby and watching burly, oil-greased men stride past him for most of the morning. His lucidity is wishy-washy, and some stretches of time are completely absent in his recollection, making him wonder if the government’s been fucking with the scanners to make them remove memories, too. The idea is terrifying, seizing, but he knows he’d be helpless to resist, not to mention protest.

“Mike,” a soft voice coos in his ear.

He shuts his eyes, warmth instantly flooding his chest at the familiar sound. There’s nobody beside him, he knows, since he’s had his back pressed against the corner of two walls in an otherwise barren lobby, and he has no doubt she’s actually miles away, someplace safe, reaching out to him through whatever channel of power it is that she possesses.

“You feel tired.”

_I am,_ he responds resoundingly inside his head, hands clenching around the stack of his documents that’s piled on his lap.

“You need to rest, you promised me you wouldn’t drive at night anymore.”

_I had to lose the cop. And you know the scanners always shake me up too much for me to fall asleep._

“Still all fuzzy, huh?”

_Where are you?_

The answering silence is cheeky, sweet. He can almost picture her sly grin. With his eyes closed, he conjures up the sight of it instantly, even as dated and distorted as it is.

_I missed you. I always miss you._

“I miss you, too. You wouldn’t believe how rabid the new system is. The girls and I have been on the run for literal weeks, trying to find a single place where our energies are at least contained, if not totally muffled. We still haven’t. And I missed you too much.”

_You aren’t in danger, are you?_

“Hm. Not right now.”

_God, I want to touch you and see you and hear you._

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Mike Wheeler?”

His eyes pop open, catching on the rotund man running the front desk of the shop. He’s holding some papers up in the air and nodding at him. “Your car’s ready. This is the final charge.”

Screaming internally at the absurd number of zeroes, Mike nevertheless stretches his hand out with the barcode visible and suffers silently as the man’s scanner beeps over it. Even as detached the payment process is, he can feel his bank account shuddering. Scanners, scanners everywhere. It’s a wonder they haven’t found a way to scan him for El’s voice. The world is terrifying and so, so lonely.

He’s led out to his car, where he checks the functioning brake lights and thanks the mechanic curtly, sliding out of the lot as quickly as he can. The first red light is in an empty area of the neighborhood, devoid of any sign of life, so he barely even startles when El’s voice, infinitely more real and loving, swims into his head. “Boo.”

The accompanying caress of her lips on his ear slackens his muscles, and he lets out one tortured, “El,” before his vision goes entirely black. It’s only ever this dark when El does it, because her magic blocks every possible ray of light that could filter through, and he obediently slides into the passenger seat, carefully maneuvering around the center console with her gentle hands guiding him along the way. He leans back and lets out a heavy breath as he listens to her climb to take his spot, setting the car into gear and speeding across the intersection.

“You were watching me inside the auto shop,” he concludes suspiciously, voice feeling too loud in the car. He’d be concerned that cops will pull them over, but he knows El would sense them coming from miles away.

“I was,” she says, a smile curling around the sounds tenderly.

“Where are we going?”

Two knuckles gently pinch the tip of his nose in playful retribution. “You know better.”

“How long do we have?”

“Not very long at all.”

“El,” he mumbles, voice trembling.

“I’m sorry. We have to find a temporary sanctuary before I can get too bold, but I’m doing my best. I’ve really been looking everywhere, Mike, I’ve gone as far up as Yukon, and everything seems to feed off our radiation. I mean, it’s not just reflecting us, it’s actually blasting us straight into the stratosphere, a thousand times stronger.”

“The news said they hunted down another four in Canada this week, I – I really thought –“

“No,” El soothes him with her low voice, one hand brushing over his cheek. “I’d tell you.”

“What if you didn’t have time, what if they found you and killed you before you could – “

“They would never find us without me knowing about their approach with enough time to tell you.”

His hand reaches out carefully toward her, finding her own already in the air with the fingers separated, waiting for him. He intertwines them and kisses her knuckles, clutching the whole bundle of digits to his chest. “Please.”

“I’d tell you, Mike.”

They ride in silence as he tries to process the fact that he is touching El’s skin for the first time in thirteen weeks, feeling her warmth against his heart and hearing her voice outside of his head, instead of within it. How much has the world stripped away from them.

Soon enough, he hears sound of loose gravel crunching beneath the car, and then the engine turns off. Her hand is still clenched between both of his, pressed tight to his ribs.

“Mike, you wanna go in?”

“I,” he begins, voice cracking, and his fingers press tighter on her skin, wishing he could clutch the whole of her to him so easily. “Is it safe?”

“Yes, it is,” she indulges, voice serene. She’s speaking in the direction of the driver’s side door, seemingly studying their surroundings. He wonders if it’s another abandoned house, this time, or someplace less lonely. He knows better than to ask.

“Here, let me,” she mutters, opening her door and sliding out. Seconds later, his door opens and his body floats an inch off his seat, hovering in the air. He tenses each of his muscles, just like she always tells him to, turning himself into a box of clothes, as she likes to say, rather than a pile of them.

The air is even hotter now as noon spreads over the town, and he briefly remembers that he only has until midnight tonight to deliver his boss’s seven contracts to her lawyer. A part of him wonders if he gives a shit.

A door closes behind him before he even realizes that he’s passed through it, and then his body flattens against a soft surface. His fingers investigate and find it to be a bed, covered in silky bedding and smelling faintly of citrus.

“I missed your smell,” he whispers, grimacing away from the sheets.

El chuckles, an arm’s length away, as one of her hands trails lightly from his knee up his thigh, teasing. “And what is my smell, Michael Wheeler?”

“Lavender,” he answers instantly, sitting up to feel around for her waist. Finding it, he drags himself close, digging his face into her soft stomach, arms wrapped so tight around her that her every breath presses against his constraint. “You smell of lavender.”

Careful hands brush his hair back, tangling in the curls and tugging at them lightly, making him moan into her skin. She giggles. “You wanna keep sniffing me, or you wanna get me naked?”

He takes another exaggerated drag of her sweater and moans with elaboration, elated by her tinkling laughter. As his fingers start to tug at the hem of her shirt, he curses the blackness that drowns his eyes, relying too much on his too-dull other senses, aching. “Both, definitely both.”

Her skin is heated and smooth under his fingers, and she straddles him eagerly as he buries his nose in her cleavage, her neck, her hairline, her shoulder, dropping kisses everywhere he can remember, biting and marking as he sees fit. He pictures the colors that used to bloom on her throat back when everything was better, when he could look at her and study her to his heart’s content. He imagines the same pinks and purples mottling her bronze body now and barely feels the hot tears that skid down his cheeks. When she uses two soft thumbs to wipe them away and gentles his thrashing eagerness with a slow kiss, he feels eternal.

\--

It seems like a full day passes them by, but the next time he floats up out of the ecstasy of El’s touch and sound and taste, she yawns against his pectoral where she’s got her cheek perched on it and mumbles, “Fuck, it’s already four.”

“Only?”

She chuckles throatily. “That last one felt like forever, huh?”

“It’s always been like that with us.”

A small pause follows, and then El turns her face so that her lips are plastered right above his heart, her hair trickling down to graze him like a breeze. “It has.”

He clears his throat, floating inside the darkness of his head, and it never gets less absurd for his mind to reconcile with this sensation. Pitch blackness always feels like something that happens at night, something that takes rest hand-in-hand, but not with El. It’s likely cloudless and bright outside right now, just the right time for a family of bumbling idiots to head out for an early dinner at the nearby diner and get scanned relentlessly on their way there, feel none of the fuzziness, endure none of the stress. Then again, the only reason each encounter with cops is so fear-inducing for him is El. Without the warmth of her inside his head, he’d have no shortage of bravery, or ignorance. But he wouldn’t trade this fear for anything.

“The last time I saw your face, we were twenty-three.”

El hums.

“I think I’ve made you immortal.”

“Oh?”

“In my head, you’ve looked exactly the same for nine years. You haven’t aged or been ill or been injured, you’re just … college El. Forever.”

“Not forever. Maybe, someday … when all this goes to hell or when someone stages a revolution … maybe then, we’ll be free.”

“As long as those scanners exist, nobody’s staging any revolutions. Remember Tucker?”

“Tucker Jones, from across the hall?”

“Yeah, sophomore year dorms, he had the big bushy mullet –“

“Right, he kept trying to teach you to play –“

“The accordion, yes! Anyway, he – he got taken recently.”

El drags a fingernail over his collarbone slowly. “Oh.”

“He apparently met some guy named Adam who used his powers accidentally to save him from wrecking his car against a tree. And he was dumb as fuck, he got out the car to get a good look at Adam, and it stayed in his head. Showed up on a scanner when he was driving home from work – they’ve started doing random stops to scan us, by the way, it’s a whole big thing – and, yeah, dragged out of the car immediately and disappeared to who-knows-where. He’d apparently kept it secret for four weeks, and the current deadline for reporting you guys to authorities is two days.”

“Two days,” she echoes, finger stilling.

“Lucas thinks they killed him. His dad works at one of the containment centers, and he hears things …”

“Do you …” El trails off, and he pictures her licking her lips, or biting them, or chewing on her fingernail. “Do you wish that I would –“

“No,” he cuts her off, arms wrapping tighter around her, crushing her to his body and pressing his face into her hair desperately. “No, no, no.”

“But Lucas –“

“Lucas doesn’t know. I don’t tell anyone anything, you know that.”

“Sure, but, Mike, don’t you think he’s figured it out? And he doesn’t have to _see_ anything or _hear_ anything, you know that even thoughts aren’t safe anymore –“

“El, no, I can’t. I can’t have you leave me. You can’t leave me.”

She soothes him with soft pecks all along his sternum, up, up, up, until she reaches his mouth. Distracting him for long minutes with her kiss, she almost lulls him back from the panic he’d worked himself up into. “I won’t,” she breathes against his lips. “Breathe for me.”

He buries his fingers in her hair, as short as it’s always been, just curling around her face, and moans into her mouth as he rolls them over, trying to lose himself again in El.

She’s pliant, lets him bend her as he wishes, tugging her around on the mattress as he tries to remember the texture of her skin, the vibration of her voice, the susurrus of her hisses.

“I hate not seeing you,” he snarls into her throat before he bites it, and she only hums back patiently, biting him back even harder on the lip when she drags his chin up firmly.

“We have forever, Mike,” she pants, laving her tongue over his jaw, “we have eternity.”

“No, we don’t,” he whimpers, falling back to the sheets and letting his fingers loosen from around her wrist. “We have nothing, El.”

She shifts carefully and leans close, tugging his face into her chest and kissing his forehead. “Mike, I am eternal, and so are you. I’d die before I let anything happen to you, I don’t sleep when I sense cops within a mile of you, I listen all the time. But this is just the game we play now. The world has changed, but it will change again.”

The silence after her words seems to ring between them, and he comforts himself by counting the breaths she takes as they make her ribcage expand against his.

“You’re like a ghost,” he tells her, facing where he thinks her eyes are, but keeping his own closed. No use in keeping them open, after all. “I feel like any day I’ll turn around and you’ll have never existed at all.”

“Mike, I’m always here, I’m inside you,” she taps his temple lightly. “I’m never leaving.”

“It’s worst of all when you go,” he continues, dam well and truly burst. He never tells her of his worries, of his struggles, trying to leave their very rare reunions clear of any weight. Gravity always pulls them down anyway, between his blindness and her constant psychic vigilance. “I’m left with nothing except what could have just been fantasies. I don’t even know anymore if I merely dreamed you.”

El drops to the pillows beside him, curled around him, and they both breathe in silence. Having well and truly killed the mood, Mike thinks it’s only fair that he stays silent while she climbs out of bed and pads with bare feet to the bathroom. When she returns, she smells of cheap soap and cloying linen, so he sticks his face in her neck to forget. A motel, it must be. He wonders if she’s keeping it secret because she plans to take him here again. The abandoned house, she’d let him wake up in alone the next day, and he’d stared at its every nook and crevice with longing so visceral that it felt like a crater inside him.

He drifts off into a blessed doze to the sensation of her all around him, and faintly, on the surface level, hears the soft sounds of her moving around and getting dressed. When she kisses him awake, it crushes something inside of him for the millionth time, because that means their time is up. He wonders how many times it can keep getting crushed before there's none of it left.

She helps him dress himself, giggling and making jokes and trying to lighten the air that he always somehow poisons with his misery when it’s time for them to part. At the door, she slams him into a wall and kisses him so deep and thorough that he thinks he’ll remember it for days. Then, she levitates him again until they’re back inside the car, and drives them several streets away before braking slowly near a dead end.

“El,” he rasps, reaching for her, and she leans as close to him as she can, tugging him tightly to her and kissing all along the length of his right cheek, biting his earlobe, and fisting his hair in her hand until it almost hurts. “El,” he laughs.

“I love you,” she murmurs into his skin, and the smell of lavender is overwhelming. It’s never intricate or pungent with her, rather very delicate, but it is so intoxicating that he wants to weep.

“I love you,” he croaks back, memorizing the shape of her in his arms.

Slowly, she detaches herself from him, disentangling their limbs, and retreats back to her side of the car. “Until next time,” she whispers, and he doesn’t know if it was inside his head, doesn’t know if she’s even in the car anymore.

He leans back in his seat and thumps his crown against the headrest violently, face crumpled as he tries to keep his rage at bay. Slowly, color permeates his vision and he realizes that the red of his eyelids means that the sun is still in the sky. He blinks lethargically at the empty seat next to him and then shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees stars, breathing wetly.

\--

There are no sirens this time, only flashing lights, and as soon as they flicker at his periphery, Mike slows into the shoulder, heart in his throat. Having only been on the road for less than half an hour after his and El’s rendezvous, he knows that getting scanned now will be annihilating. He only has five more hours to get the contracts to the attorney’s office, or he’s fired. He still isn’t sure if he cares, but he guesses he’d rather have the option to decide.

The cop is quiet, merely squints at his passport and hands it back without comment. Just as one of his hands reaches for the scanner hanging from his waist, another car zooms past them at well past the legal speed limit. The cop rears back. Mike thinks he hears El's laughter.

“Son, your back lights are dead. Take care of that pronto if you don’t want to get a ticket, you hear?”

He blinks, befuddled, and nods mechanically, doing whatever it seems is most likely to get the cop off his back.

One hand waving Mike away, the guy runs to his patrol car and takes off after the offending vehicle, leaving Mike seated with sweaty hands clamped around his papers and trembling raggedly.

When twenty minutes have passed and no other cars appear in the road ahead or behind him, he unfolds himself from his seat and ambles to look at his lights. They’re off again. The primal shriek that yearns to rip from his throat stays contained, and he flops back down into his seat, reaching for the glove compartment to find the brochure from the auto shop that had apparently scammed him.

When he lifts the papers, something small and square tumbles out and onto his lap. With shaking fingers, he lifts it up to find a polaroid of El, dated today, as she had lain with her chin propped on his shoulder blade while he slept. He cannot see anything behind or around her, just her beloved face smiling tranquilly into the camera, and his finger traces gently over the lines of neck and hair, finding her utterly unchanged from nine years ago, if only just a little less happy. Minutes, maybe hours, pass by as he studies her, the loving way in which her fingers are spread over his freckles, which extend into the bottom corners of the photo that stop approximately at his other shoulder blade.

This is playing with fire, but that's their game. This photo, burned forever into his heart, may show up the next time he's scanned, may be the reason he disappears like poor Tucker did and is never heard from again. But what a small price to pay.

As the sky darkens a bit more, he tucks the square into a secret compartment beneath his wheel where he keeps the hair band she’d left behind in his back seat nineteen encounters ago, which still faintly smells of her, and turns back to the brochure. As soon as he opens it, he knows she did it, and at the same moment his eyes alight on a stack of bills, exactly the amount he had paid at the auto shop. He flicks through them and finds a note at the end, scribbled in her familiar – if slightly disguised – handwriting.

_They scammed you so I took the money back out of their registers. You know you could have just asked me. Kick each light once, gently. That’s me kicking you for being dumb. _

Pressing the note to his lips he blinks with awe at the winding street before him. Feeling fragile, he walks back out and kicks each light, gently, while the car idles. The lights flicker on. He kneels on the ground beside the exhaust pipe and tries to breathe. “El.”

After a while, he gets to his feet again and walks back to his seat. He hides the note beside the photograph and sticks the money in his wallet, laughing in disbelief. He can almost feel her in the car with him, like she never left. “I love you.” As the sun begins to set and his deadline draws close, the words echo inside his head, and he isn’t sure who said them.

**Author's Note:**

> This one's dedicated to Rebecca, my dear sweet fresh steamed bun 🍞
> 
> To those who have continued to read and leave feedback on my contributions to this fandom, though they be but few and far between, thank you so much. Your readership has meant and still means more to me than I can ever say 💕I have so thoroughly enjoyed exploring these characters with you!


End file.
